CITY PLANNING ARTICLES

Monumental squares, wide boulevards and other such spaces have their place in a city just like picturesque squares, narrow sidestreets and interior courtyards. A carefully planned monumentality and picturesque intimacy ought to be used to make a modern city as attractive as a medieval city with its charm created by the vivid contrast between a richly decorated cathedral and narrow streets lined with a row of simple houses.

Eliel Saarinen, in Der Städtenbau, 1921.

The years of transition between the l9th and 20th centuries were marked by a great number of cultural, social and political events. While industrialization in Europe and colonization outside the European continent were forcibly marching forward, favoring the emergence of new powers and irreversibly changing geopolitical balances, which broke down and led to the first world war, the cultural movements which were to influence the whole of the 20th century were laying their foundations.

The publication of Ebenezer Howard's book and the construction of the first garden cities were not isolated events in the history of town planning but part of a broader reflection on the consequences of industrialization on territorial planning.

In effect, from the time when the steam engine made its first appearance in the 1700s and this new production system was first applied on a vast scale, the enthusiastic acclaim of the supporters of technological progress was in contrast to the feelings of those, decidedly a minority, who were worried about the consequences of a global revolution affecting society as well as its natural and artificial environment.

The criticism of poets and men of letters such as Coleridge and Wordsworth1 was the first warning sign to a society faced with changes in its economic system and a radical distortion of its settlement patterns - the countryside was being progressively abandoned while cities were sprawling beyond all confines, regardless of any organic structure. Engels'2 lucid and concise analysis of English society and revelations about the conditions of the working class, concentrated mainly in the agglomerations around Liverpool and Manchester, were the first conscious acknowledgement of the problem of industry and its effects on social relationships, so that for the first time the issue of town planning entered the arena of social conflicts. William Morris's work3 marked the adoption of the city as the theme for a plan for social reform.

The common denominator between these positions, which were unduly classified according to antinomies such as right-wing/left-wing, was a strong warning against the `perverse' effects of technological progress on the social environment, i.e. the city. This cultural theme underlay the optimistic and positivist official culture of the first few decades of the l9th century, but gradually came to the surface of the town planning debate and

became increasingly important in intellectual circles.

The rejection of urban civilization by English industrialized society can be seen as a reaction against the upheaval of people from the countryside, with its characteristic habits and traditions, and forced migration to the slums in the new urban agglomerations which grew up due to the inevitable presence of mining or manufacturing industries, together with the denial of the traditional relationship between city and country. This happened regardless of unquestionable scientific advances and the struggle against infant deaths.

The establishment of industrial factories that were completely out of scale in relation to the established perception of the urban environment, and by extension comparable to villages and even pre-industrial cities4, in addition to the rapid unplanned creation of townships near coal deposits, the incredible expansion of historical towns5 subject to the growing and often violent phenomena of urbanization, were perceived as signs of a cancer6 which struck the nation indiscriminately, affecting romantic landscapes as well as working class quarters, rather than as a tangible sign of the social and urban progress heralded by the positivists.

Urban aggregation thus became increasingly synonymous of hell on hearth, with vast crowded working class areas where people with no local ties were forced to live in conditions that were completely alien to the customs of both city and country life.

This situation stimulated the search for alternative solutions, which were embodied by the theories and `utopian' experiments characterizing town planning in the l9th century from Fourier to Owen7. However, more generally, there emerged the tendency to reject uncontrolled industrialization in favor of a return to a community lifestyle inspired by an organic relationship between the productive and settlement systems and a conscious reappraisal of craftsmanship and farming.

Romantic Town Planning

During the l9th century, the Middle Ages became the principal inspiration for this tendency in town planning, after its proponents had looked back in history to find alternative models to industrial development.

At a time when the breakdown of the balance between a rural economy and towns serving as marketplaces and manufacturing centers, mainly for handicrafts, was causing growing concern and a feeling of collective anxiety which transformed itself into class conflicts, the romantic Middle Ages were perceived as a time of stability where balanced social relations created a balance between man and his natural environment.

The Middle Ages, whose "city air makes man free"8, became a cultural topos of extraordinary attraction compared to an industrial era where technological progress seemed to have destroyed the harmony of natural spaces and distorted city spaces, both formally and socially.

As a result, many throughout Europe went in search of their roots, traditions and links with the past in order to fill the void created by the alienation of industrial society and to establish an appropriate cultural focus for a plan to counteract

Nostalgia for the Past was stimulated by various political and nationalist movements during the l9th century as they considered the Middle Ages the cradle of a civilization able to reconcile city and country, freedom and necessity, individuality and a superior order.

Roused by the writings of Victor Hugo on medieval Paris9, Viollet-le-Duc on the architecture of gothic cathedrals10 and John Ruskin on the ruins of ancient cities11, the romantic tendency in town planning gradually emerged by refining its composition techniques and defining its constituent elements..

When Howard published Tomorrow, Camillo Sitte's book12 had already been around for ten years and had become an indispensable tool for all those wishing to build a city where aesthetic principles were as important as the dominating technical considerations.

In his critique of `modern' town planning13 Sitte reviewed city spaces in the past and, having identified the square as the principal public space in European urban models, he analyzed the reasons why this spaces was successful and tried to deduce rules which would help regain the formal quality of a traditional city.

As part of a global pedagogical plan, Sitte followed up the publication of his research with a series of demonstrations of his theories and a militant commitment to the diffusion of a town planning culture by founding, together with Theodor Goecke, "Der Städtebau", a journal which was to play a unique role in the promotion of romantic town planning14.

Sitte's influence on the architects of the garden cities is evident from Unwin's own statements15 and from his search for ideas inspired by the creation of a public space where a defined closed perimeter and picturesque effects could create a city rich in aesthetic qualities like a pre-modern traditional city. However, Sitte played an even more important role in inspiring an urban model that differed completely from the monotony and repetitiveness of the towns of the industrial civilization.

The Village as an Alternative to Industrial Development

By 1878 the completion of the religious settlement of Sint Amandsberg in Gent, executed by Arthur Verhaegen, was a concrete example of the establishment of a new interest in town planning which tended to re-adopt those models of the medieval tradition which had survived the introduction of classical Renaissance styles and had coexisted with them throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, continuing to remain a part of popular culture.

The decision to build a new quarter to house the people evicted from St. Elizabeth Begjinhof, following the principles of medieval religious settlements and contrary to what had been done in Brussels by H. L. F. Partoes16 during the first half of the l9th century, was an indication of the will to re-establish values such as solidarity and mutual assistance, which were the characteristic links of a community that felt it had a common tradition. Consequently, the settlement model became a fundamental factor in the development of the community and the symbol of a lifestyle based on eternal principles that were unaffected by the dynamics and tensions of the industrial world.

The urban village, spatially confined but financially self-sufficient, designed as a hierarchical space where the shape and position of the building had a specific meaning in its social organization and led to harmonious and orderly human relations, distinguishable due to its spatial configuration, rooted in the ground like the materials used to build it were rooted in the local architectural tradition, became the full physical expression of the political and social design of a community that wished to become reconciled with nature whilst conducting an urban lifestyle.

The need to set a limit to each new settlement in order to favor the identification of the location and to characterize it with the presence of formally representative public buildings, and so to develop a feeling of community, was the main preoccupation of the reformist town planners who belonged to the Howard and Unwin school of thought as well as of the many `enlightened' entrepreneurs like the Duke Englebert d'Arenberg in Gent, who worried about creating an urban environment that maintained the qualities of a traditional city even during the industrial era.

Thus in 1903, in the same year that the first garden city was built in Letchworth, Theodor Fischer17 began constructing a village in Reutlingen that was intended to house the workers of the Ulrich Gminder textile mill. This was a rectangular settlement characterized by a network of rectangular blocks of largely semi-detached houses. The focus on the public dimension of the project was represented by the presence of a main thoroughfare overlooked by a market square, which lead to a semicircular square where the village civic center was at the center of two circles of terraced bungalows joined by pitched roofs with skylights.

This work was part of a planning strategy which constitutes a good example of the influence exerted by the medieval tradition on town planning in Germany and at the same time by the garden city movement. In 1899-1900, for instance, Fischer chose the Kohleninsel in Munich to build a typical Bavarian village conceived as a museum, with a large assembly hall, and an extended square with a colonnade and a tower to close it. As a true exercise in urban composition according to traditional principles, the island village on the river Isar represented the essence of the Bavarian medieval spirit. Villages in the Bavarian countryside such as Deggendorf, Donauwörth, Gruenzburg, Straubing, Tittmoning, etc. were used as symbols and reproduced in the centre of the Bavarian capital to highlight cultural root and emphasize the importance of tradition in the building of contemporary cities.

While the Hampstead Garden Suburb was being founded (1907), a number of important village projects were being executed in Germany which were inspired by the garden city theories and by romantic town planning.

Richard Riemerschmid began building a village for the workers of the Hagener Textilindustrie in Hagen. It was conceived around a rectangular central square overlooked by public buildings, with one-family houses ordered in a series of groupings and with each house having a long back garden within the plot. Using the two-store residential model, the village created a sophisticated effect due to the intelligent combination of various facades, depending on the road, with a strong feeling of unity created by the use of stone for the facades and by the pitched roofs with lofts and large skylights providing light for the bedrooms.

The two villages designed by Robert Schmohl in 1907 in Bochum-Hordel and in Datteln were clearly inspired by the garden city concept and as such totally antithetical to the big industrial city model. They were an attempt to create a community closely linked to its natural habitat, with a strong rural character. The first village had 339 pavilion-style double houses primarily located along the roads, a central square with large areas of green and a typically rural appearance. The second, conceived as one of the Krupp industry's three colonies, adopted its essential lines but had more squares with trees, though these were not supported by the presence of public buildings.

On the other hand, Olof Hallmann's project for the Lärkstaden quarter in Stockholm18 was totally urban, having been conceived according to the aesthetic principles defined by Camillo Sitte and fully representing the Swedish National Romantic tendency. The quarter was built on the outskirts, to the north of the city between Norrmalm and Ostermalm, covering an area of 8 hectares, as a paradigmatic exercise in traditional town planning that was rich in elements drawn from vernacular architecture. Being divided into 9 blocks of houses and formal dominated by the stature of the Engel Brektskyrkan, a church on the hill around which the new town was created, the Lärkstaden quarter was made up of various types of housing that were three to four storeys high with brick facades and attics. The use of green areas for the cohesion of public spaces, from the squares to the park around the church, were exemplary of the romantic nature of a big city and thus confirmed the importance of creating a coherent and unified environment while leaving room for different picturesque effects to accentuate the identification of the community with its physical location.

A considerable advance in defining the urban model of a formally independent garden city was made with the founding of the Margarethenhöhe in Essen19. This was conceived in 1906 to provide housing for the Krupp factory workers and covered an area of about 50 hectares. To separate the new city from other built-up areas and to mark the confines of the urban area, a green belt was created along which ran a road planted with trees. It was designed by Georg Metzendorf as a true medieval `bastide' with city gates, churches, squares and markets.

Being completely surrounded by a circle of trees, the garden city seemed compact and perfectly hierarchical, with its main public buildings placed in the squares so as to offer a certain reference point and to restrict the perspective, thus creating balanced open spaces on a human scale. Commercial spaces, on the other hand, were located along the main roads, in corners and overlooking squares. The use of residential buildings grouped together and materials for the facades drawn from the vernacular tradition (bare brickwork, stone and wood), combined with a design inspired by the German medieval tradition, made Margarethenhöhe a model town of the German romantic tradition and a model for the planning of independent new towns.

Germanic romantic town planning, which had experienced a continuous oscillation between two poles - rural and urban became a deeply rooted tendency in society at the beginning of the 20th century and began to lead to the creation of a social project that was totally different to industrial development.

The restoration of craftsmanship as a production system, based on Pierre Kropotkin's theories20, and the search for the fundamental characteristics of the settlement tradition which was developing in parallel with political nationalism, led to an acknowledgement of the importance of small towns and villages as roots of German culture.

In 1908 Deutschen Werkstätten began to build the garden city of Hellerau near Dresden. Built on hilly ground, the new settlement had strong rural connotations and a series of separate nuclei, around a craft centre which was to guarantee the community's financial independence.

Whilst Heinrich Tessenow tried to create a monumental effect with his original classical buildings, Richard Riemerschmid worked on the language of the vernacular of German villages for the design of a group of different buildings - commercial and residential in the `Am grünen Zipfl' area21. Following this example, Georg Metzendorf built the garden city of Huttenau, near Hattingen, on about 60 hectares of ground, in the same year that saw the publication of Unwin's Town Planning in Practice (1909) and, in 1911, the Marl-Brassert colony was begun to house workers from nearby factories.

It was due to Paul Schmitthenner22 that the village or small town model became an element of a global planning strategy for the creation of a polycentric territorial structure as an alternative to the monocentric growth of the industrial metropolis. Schmitthenner was a predominant figure, belonging to that truly German cultural tendency in search of a settlement model which corresponded to an economic and social conception capable of liberating man from the slavery imposed by the industrial system, class warfare, and the confrontation of radically different interests. His work was thus devoted to the adoption of tradition as the basis for planning.

The study of German cities, their morphological characteristics, the rules for their establishment as well as the recognition of the polycentric root of the settlement system led to the drive to find answers to the problems of industrial society by considering such fundamental elements as the balance and harmony of a traditional city.

The rejection of disproportionate and uncontrolled growth, dictated exclusively by the laws of the economies of agglomeration and maximization of industrial profit, led to the rediscovery of an economic, social and settlement system based on communities organized geographically so as to optimize the exploitation of local agricultural resources and give rise to independent economies. This was a philosophy permeated with Howard's garden city theories and Sitte's lesson on the values of traditional architecture.

After having worked on the construction of the garden city of Carlowitz near Wroclaw (1911-1913), from 1914 onwards Schmitthenner became involved in planning a new garden city in Staaken, near Berlin23, conceived as the paradigm of a small satellite city aiming to resolve the problem of the expansion of a large metropolis like the capital of the Reich.

Built on about 40 hectares of trapeze-shaped ground, the new city revealed a richer basic design, with two-storey one-family houses lined in strict rows along the roads, and a layout giving the whole a clear and ordered organization. By drawing from the formal repertory of the urban language of the traditional city, Schmitthenner included a series of square-shaped and rectangular squares to mark the entrance to the new city along the two main axes. The center was defined by a square-shaped square with a colonnade all around it and full of shops, workshops and public buildings, whilst a church, which was in a more sheltered position than the central square yet linked to it, was a symbolic focus for the community, following the lessons of Stralsund and Braunschweig.

Although the city was built at low density levels such as 1000 families per 40 hectares, typical of Howard's theories, it offered an extraordinary variety of environmental solutions derived from the careful study of perspectives and the intelligent organization of public space into a series of small regular squares, and by creating main roads that were not straight in order to provide a gradual perception of the various parts of the city.

The use of traditional materials such as brick for external walls and sharply sloping pitched roofs with skylights and gables (clearly recognizable elements of a popular language) was an emblematic example of a coherent and unified design, from an economic, social, architectural and formal point of view.

By continuing to experiment with this design philosophy with the garden city of Plaue near Brandenburg (1915-1917), Paul Schmitthenner achieved the full expression of his position in the debate on the expansion of the city during the industrial era through the Soest town planning project formulated together with Gustav Langen24.

By addressing the theme of urban expansion and the formulation of appropriate regulations, the winning project in the 1916 competition can be considered to be the manifesto for the tendency towards traditionalist/town planning polycentrism in Germany. Contrary to the practice of indiscriminate radial expansion based on the model made famous by the Viennese Ring and applied almost everywhere in Europe, from Milan to Wiesbaden and from Bologna to Brno, the design created by Schmitthenner and Langen envisaged the construction of five new independent quarters linked to the old town via radial main roads, yet formally and administratively independent. The first of the new quarters to be built, Neustadt Soest, was actually conceived as a new town.

The plan thus allowed for a doubling of Soest's population (20,000 inhabitants) through a process of organic duplication that was typical of the European town planning tradition, and the foundation of new colonies and towns around the mother city. This allowed both the individuality of the centre to be maintained and suburbs to be created that were not anonymous and subordinate to the ancient nucleus but a series of true new towns conceptually similar yet different from their generator with their own character and identity. These were five new communities aiming to revitalize a community of old people with new energy and not weigh it down and complicate it, as was the case with monocentric expansion.

Neustadt, situated to the south-east of the historic city ring, served as a model for all the successive quarters. It was built on about 50 hectares with a density of 100 people per hectare, and was characterized by a cross-shaped road system made up of two main roads intersecting at an octagonal central square, at the center of which stood one of the churches. Along the road linking the old town, which also converged on the square, there were two other squares separated by a public building, one of which was a marketplace and the other occupied by a church. Its hierarchy was clearly denoted by the buildings with colonnades in the main squares, and residential housing was made up primarily of one-family houses grouped in a series according to the formal principles of the garden city.

The desire to create a new city that was clearly distinct from the old city, yet immediately recognizable, was also evident from Schmitthenner and Langen's decision to found the new settlement on a surface area comparable to Soest (50 hectares as opposed to 85) to help it resist the natural attraction of the old center and develop independently.

This idea, which was subject to profound changes as a result of the first world war, provided a stimulus for a whole generation of German town planners, such as Ehlgötz with his design for the garden city of Käfertal25, committed to the continuity of the tradition of the foundation town.

In fact, while Schmitthenner's work proceeded with the villages of Siedlungen Ookswinkel (1918-1924) near Baden-Baden, Schnödeneck (1919-1920) near Sindelfingen and Kochendorf (1919-1920) near Bad Friedrichshall, Germany's defeat and the accompanying political/institutional chaos forced many intellectuals to reflect upon the nature and logic of the industrial system and try to find a universal solution which could avoid the risks connected with the process of accumulation and continuing competition fostered by the industrial capitalist system.

This reflection was distant at first, then matured slowly yet consistently and single-mindedly. While Europe was being ravaged by war and the armies of the various powers were slaughtering each other, the elegant pages of "Der Städtebau"26 were preoccupied with presenting the most significant examples of new romantic town planning, with no territorial barriers, for the Newark plan was placed alongside the Warsaw plan in the same year that American troops moved in against Austria and Germany.

A new factor which intervened in the history of romantic town planning, with regard to the original positions of the garden city movement, was an awareness which developed mainly in German circles, who had experienced the worst of the first world war disaster, that industrial civilization did not only produce congestion and adverse living conditions in the new metropolitan suburbs but also carried the seeds of dangerous social conflicts that could lead mankind to disaster.

From this new standpoint, the critique of the industrial model became a political program aiming to reconcile man with the means of production and to create different organic communities living in harmony with nature and with each other, as the basis for the survival of a national community.

The garden city, the rural village and the small independent town became the resources used to formulate a political and economic program to resolve the serious problems of savage capitalism and at the same time to lay the foundations for an orderly system to prevent, from the start, the social tensions which the Russian revolution, and later the German revolution, had shown to be a deterministic product of the industrial system.

The development of Morris' and Sitte's theories, enriched by the contributions of Howard and Tessenow and taking into account Schmitthenner's experiments, proceeded steadily in Germany, at the same pace as a growing awareness of the link between the structure of a settlement and its social organization.

The study of the traditional city conducted by people such as Werner Hegemann27 and Karl Gruber28 became the key to the creation of a real alternative to match social achievements and a spirit of solidarity with the development of a form of settlement based on craftsmanship and small industries, within the context of a renewed balance with the natural environment.

All these various experiments subsequently merged together within an explicitly anti-industrial philosophy against the logic of agglomeration and centralization.

The publication of the results of Christaller's research29 on the economic rules which governed the spatial order of settlements and the formulation of the theory on central localities revolutionized the old theorem, which favored urbanization and the concentration of resources and population in a small number of urban areas as a deterministic response to technological progress.

Christaller's studies offered a completely different perspective and, more importantly, offered a practical alternative based on a concise analysis of the social and economic characteristics of many areas in Germany. Christaller demonstrated that at the root of an efficient economic system lay a form of settlement which rationalized the exploitation of resources.

He further demonstrated that such a form of settlement was not accidental but depended on a specific geometrical territorial structure, i.e. the overlapping of hexagonal links ordered according to the hierarchy of urban centers placed at the top, based on the fundamental relationship between a central locality and a `complementary' farming area.

The planning of a settlement system to replace the metropolis/suburbs binomial with an organic and complex system of urban localities, hierarchically organized depending on location, became a coherent development of the traditional polycentric system of settlement. Ordered polycentrism, i.e. based on a complex system of relations between the various central localities, provided the scientific foundations for new town planning.

There were no longer to be urban areas dense with industries and saturated with a population mainly occupied within them, but a system of small and medium-sized towns and villages, each having direct access to efficiently worked farming land. The garden city project was becoming more sophisticated. Craftwork, small industries and farming were to become the engine for the economy of a new territorial structure that would be conscientiously and systematically antithetical to the big industry/big city binomial.

Just as Europe was being hit by the 1929 crisis and a new failure of industrial capitalism, romantic town planning seemed increasingly to be the natural answer to brutal and inefficient planning.

Following the success of the theories proposed by Howard, Tessenow and Christaller, the plan to create small towns became an integral part of the policy of the national socialist movement's left-wing in Germany which took power in 1933, when national policy made a significant contribution due especially to Gottfried Feder's efforts, who was later nominated head of the territorial planning bureau.

The transition from Howard's utopia to an institutional program marked the climax of this tendency. Feder formulated a systematic plan for territorial renovation based on the adoption of a model town of 20,000 inhabitants as a matrix for development.

In his monumental work, Die Neue Stadt30, Feder first offered a detailed critique of the monocentric metropolis model, taking examples such as Berlin and Munich to underline the problems of congestion and economic/social imbalances caused by centralization, and then analyzed 30 German cities with between 20,000 and 30,000 inhabitants to highlight the advantages of such forms of settlement.

By combining the theories of Howard and Christaller on polycentrism with the experiences of Sitte, Unwin, Schmitthenner and Tessenow, Feder was able to produce a global report on territorial planning, where a town with 20,000 inhabitants constituted the generating matrix.

This was a small town planned in great functional and morphological detail both in terms of the Cristallgram and the presentation of numerous projects, which were clearly influenced by the garden city movement. Within a radial layout, similar to Howard's circular scheme, there were 8 quarters, each covering 25 hectares and sited around an octagonal central nucleus covering 18 hectares, while the whole site covered an area of about 218 hectares.

Each quarter was planned on the basis of an accurate distribution of functions and public spaces, where the fundamental principle was that "every town is an organism"31 and not the algebraic sum of functions or areas assigned to homogeneous activities. Consequently, with typical German rigour, each activity was analyzed in terms of its dimensional and spatial characteristics to find the best position for it in the urban grid. The analysis even went as far as to specify the surface area for a plot and that required for each public building, such as the town hall, the school, the church, the market, the post office, the hospital etc. The "night of the long knives" and the defeat of the left-wing within the national socialist party brought an end to Feder's work as head of the German territorial planning bureau, which had caused serious clashes with the interests of high finance and the big monopolies. His staff was imprisoned or forced into exile32, leaving room for the proponents of large-scale industrial development, which was the essential prerequisite for the imperialist policies of the Reich and for the re-armament necessary for the wars of conquest33.

As Heinrich Tessenow had lucidly predicted, "it will probably be necessary to be exposed to sulphureos rain before craftwork and the city can be reunited; their union probably demands the crossing of hell"34.

The Organically Polycentric City in the Design of New Capitals: Tallin, Canberra, Helsinki.

While the garden city movement was developing in Great Britain and Germany, important developments in romantic planning were also taking place in Scandinavia and especially in Finland.

Here, the influx of theories on polycentric socialism expounded by William Morris and Ebenezer Howard came at a time of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with its tradesmen's associations and transcendent religious spirit, and formed the core of the National Romanticism that spread across Finland at the end of the l9th century as the cultural movement that brought about independence from Russia.

In fact, after the Constitution had been granted in 1869, the Russian imperialist policy of Nicholas II produced a radical change in the relationship between the young Grand Duchy and the tsarist state, ending with the abolition of the parliamentary Diet in 1899 and the revocation of the Constitution in 1903 and thereby giving rise to strong nationalist feeling.

Being firmly anchored to society due to its l9th century roots, created by the echoes of the battles for independence of European peoples and romantic culture, the independence movement fuelled the diffusion of a national conscience which in turn drew strength from figures such as the poet, Elias Lönnrot, the painter, Akseli Gallen-Kallela and the composer, Jean Sibelius. Their common inspiration was Nordic forest mythology and the landscape as a matrix of cultural identity.

As part of this highly dynamic scenario, architecture and artistic representation became powerful means for expressing a nationalist feeling which supported the democratic struggles in tsarist Russia, though not having yet experienced the lacerations of class warfare35.

Camillo Sitte's teaching on the structure of the medieval city was re-interpreted to guide the implementation of an ideal program in which the spiritual community served a dual purpose as symbol of national identity and as an alternative to the distortion of traditions and cultural heritage caused by heavy industrialization.

The leading proponents of this position, which embodied a philosophical conception, political choices and artistic production, were Lars Sonck, Herman Gesellius, Armas Lindgren and Eliel Saarinen.

Having strong convictions about the revealing and didactic effect of architecture, these architects elaborated a national romantic style where the predominance of traditional materials and the use of archaic forms of the vernacular tended towards the expression of a feeling of belonging to an organic community and the preservation and declaration of its values36.

Through the construction of public buildings such as the headquarters of the telephone company in Helsinki and the cathedral of Tampere by Sonck, or the national Museum in Helsinki by Gesellius, Lindgren and Saarinen, the new national conscience materialized in the coarse granite of the facades and the sloping roofs inspired by the large collective buildings of the Middle Ages, providing the population with an immediate element with which to establish their identity and find reasons to continue with the struggle for independence.

It was in this cultural climate that Eliel Saarinen's organic polycentrist town planning philosophy matured37. Following an especially prosperous economic period for the country, between 1910 and 1923 Saarinen looked at a series of important planning schemes in Finland and in various countries, in Europe and beyond, and then proceeded to create a polycentric town planning scheme for the expansion of historical cities and the foundation of new cities.

The scheme for the construction of the new city of Munkkiniemi-Haaga, started in 1910 and completed in 1915, confirmed the validity of the principle of urban growth through the foundation of new nuclei, in contrast with the monocentric approach.

To address the problem of defining rules for urban expansion in Helsinki following a large increase in population, the scheme provided for the `doubling' of the city through the construction of another city to the north-west of the old one, that was to be completely independent and have the same population as the mother city, i.e. 170,000 inhabitants.

The new city of Munkkiniemi-Haaga, commissioned by a private company, STENIUS, offered a pleasant combination of urban composition principles derived from Haussmann's Paris, such as axiality, wide boulevards, symbolic centrality for public buildings, experimental picturesque ideas and a multiplicity of perspectives derived from Sitte's work.

It was conceived as a polycentric structure divided into various quarters linked to each other via wide avenues planted with trees, and carefully designed, with the various urban compartments (public and residential buildings) defined by the widespread use of green spaces as connective elements and the adoption of architectural solutions derived from the garden city experiments.

Another important occasion for the elaboration of the polycentric urban scheme was provided by the 1911 international Competition organized by the Australian government for the construction of a new federal capital with an estimated population of 25,000 inhabitants. It is interesting to note that both Saarinen's scheme (awarded second prize) and the winning scheme created by Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahoney38 were based on a plurality of centers and quarters. Griffin and Mahoney's design, more so than Saarinen's, seemed to show great attention in the use of the site and a clear expression of the polycentric nature of the urban organism, by structuring the city around the Parliamentary Triangle.

Acting as technical consultant for the Tallin city council in 1911, Saarinen took part in the Competition for a town planning scheme for the city in 1912 and won first prize. In this case, his scheme provided for the expansion of the city by constructing a series of new quarters conceived as alternative centers to the old city. The urban effect is also achieved through the intelligent use of wide leafy avenues to link the new polarities, established with the location outside the old city centre of monumental new squares and public buildings of metropolitan stature such as the Opera House.

However, it was with the Pro-Helsingfors Scheme, conceived as a guiding scheme for the whole of the Helsinki metropolitan area, that Saarinen's concept of organic decentralization was finally expressed paradigmatically.

In order to apply his town planning philosophy, Saarinen did not hesitate to move northwards the railway station that had given him international fame by winning the 1904 competition. The new station was conceived as the center of a system of independent cities including both the old polycentric nucleus of neoclassical Helsinki39 and the new city of Munkkiniemi-Haaga in addition to a series of garden cities linked to each other via an imposing railway system.

The Helsinki Scheme and its 1918 metropolitan area can be considered a true spiritual testimony to the romantic town planning philosophy of the 20th century. Even today, due to its accompanying in-depth statistical documentation and precise population forecasts, it constitutes an indispensable reference to the tendency for the cultural continuation of the European traditional city40, in that it represents the most efficient synthesis of nineteenth century reformist thinking and the organic conception of economic and social development.

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1 Contrary to what is sometimes found in certain literature, the l9th century in Great Britain was not characterized by a blind faith in progress, or a universal optimistic vision of the fortunes of mankind. English thinking on the subject changed radically during the second half of the l9th century, from boundless optimism for the perpetual technological and social advances, seemingly made possible by the sciences, to a more detached and objective vision of real living conditions in industrial societies. Wordsworth's critique of the industrial city, an evil to fought against, provided a broader description of desolate rooms in slums where the masses lived a life of thieving and robbing, outside both the civil and natural law, and became the symbol of the inauspicious influx of the industrial economy. Nature became an alternative to the chaos caused by industrial urban agglomeration and Sherwood forest the refuge of the just struggling against the wicked who lived in the usurped city.

2 cf. Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England nach eigner Anschauung und autentischen Quellen, Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1845;

3 By William Morris, besides the famous News from Nowhere, cf. also Gothic Architecture. A Lecture for the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, Kelmscott Press, London 1893; Architecture and History, Longman, London 1900; Architecture, Industry and Wealth, Collected Papers, Longman, London 1902;

4 For a more appropriate perception of the dimensions of preindustrial cities, and to be able to assess the impact of new industries on them, it is interesting to note that Munich, the capital of Bavaria, covered less than 100 hectares in the 18th century which was comparable to the dimensions of many of the industrial complexes in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham;

5 The population of Paris increased from 1,053,000 inhabitants in 1851 to 1,850,000 inhabitants in 1870, but the area occupied by some cities increased as much as tenfold during the l9th century (e.g. Munich);

6 cf. Welby Pugin, Contrasts; or parallel between the noble edifices of fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar buildings of the present day; showing the present decay of taste, London 1836;

7 cf. Charles Fourier, L'Harmonie universelle et le Phalenstère, exposées par Fourier, recueil méthodique de morceaux choisis de l'auteur, Libr. Phalansteriènne, Paris 1849; cf. Robert Owen, A New View on Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, London 1813; A supplementary Appendix to the First Volume of the Life of Robert Owen, London 1858;

8 From a popular adage originating from the special freedom from feudal or monastic slavery enjoyed by the inhabitants within the city walls;

9 cf. Victor Hugo, Notre Dame di Parigi, Mursia editore, Milano 1964; cf. especially the chapter entitled "Parigi a volo d'uccello";

10 As part of his extraordinary production, cf. especially Eugene Viollet-le-Duc, Histoire d'une ville e d'une cathédrale, Mardaga, Liège 1978; orig. ed. J. Hetzel et al., Paris 1878;

11 John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Smith Elder & Co., London 1849; The Stones of Venice, George Allen, London 1902;

12 cf. Camillo Sitte, Der Städebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, Carl Gräser Verlag, Wien 1889;

13 It is interesting to note that Sitte used the term `modern' to refer to town planning in his day, i.e. during the second half of the l9th century, but made no reference to the ideological meaning it would have in the 20th century with `modernism'. The novelty of Sitte's ideas can also be understood through the use of this simple adjective;

14 The journal entitled "Der Städtebau. Monatsschrift für die künstlerische Ausgestaltung der Städte nach ihren wirtschaftlichen, gesundheitlichen und sozialen Grundsätzen" was founded by Camillo Sitte and Theodor Goecke in 1903 and published by Ernst Wasmuth A.G., Berlin;

15 cf. Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice: an Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs, Fisher Unwin, London 1909;

16 cf. Denis Coekelberghs, Pierre Loze (eds.), Un ensemble neoclassique à Bruxelles: le Grand Hospice et le quartier du Beguinage, Institut Royal du Patrimoine artistique, Ministérede la Communauté française, Bruxelles 1983;

17 On Fischer's work (1862-1938) cf. Winfried Nerdinger, Theodor Fischer. Architekt und Städtebauer 1862-1938, Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1988; catalogue of the exhibition organized by the Technische Universität München and by the Münchner Stadtmuseum, held from l9th November 1988 to 29th January 1989 at the Münchner Stadtmuseum;

18 cf. Margareta Källström, Bo Edblad, Torsten Westman, Stockholm arckitektur, Stockholms Arkitektförening, Stockholm 1990;

19 cf. Hans G. Kösters, Dichtung in Stein und Grün Margarethenhöhe, Verlag Beleke KG, Essen 1982; cf. also Franziska Bollerey, Kristiana Hartmann, Siedlungen aus dem Reg. Bez. Düsseldorf, Kommunalverband Ruhrgebiet, Dortmund 1992; Wolfgang Schulze, Günter Richard, Historische Luftbilder des Ruhrgebietes 1924-1938, Verlag Peter Pomp, Essen 1991;

20 On the theory of economic polycentrism cf. Pierre Kropotkin, Landwirtschaft, Industrie und Handwerk, Der Syndikalist, Berlin 1921;

21 On the work of Riemerschmid (1884-1972) cf. Winfried Nerdinger, Süddeutsche Bautradition im 20. Jahrhundert, Architekten der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste, Callwey, München 1985; catalogue of the exhibition organized by the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste and by the Architektursammlung der Technischen Universität München at the Königsbau der Münchner Residenz from 14th March to 10th May 1985;

22 On Schmitthenner's work (1884-1972) cf. Winfried Nerdinger, Süddeutsche Bautradition im 20. Jahrhundert. Architekten der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste, op. cit.;

23 cf. Die Gartenstadt Staaken, in "Wasmuth Monatshefte für Baukunst", nos. 4-5, 1919;

24 cf. Theodor Goecke, Die Wettbewerbsentwürfe für die Stadterweiterung von Soest, in "Der Städtebau", no. 12, 1916;

25 cf. Die südliche Erweiterung des Vorortes Käfertal auf Gemarkung Mannheim, in "Der Städtebau", nos. 4-5, 1917;

26 cf. Georg B. Ford, Die neue Staffelbauordnung von New York, in "Der Städtebau", no. 12, 1916; L. Schoenfelder, Warschauer Stadtbild und Plangestaltung, in "Der Städtebau", nos. 2-3, 1916;

27 cf. Werner Hegemann, Albert Peets, The American Vitruvius: an Architect's Handbook of Civic Art, Architectural Book Publ. Co., New York 1922; by Hegemann cf. also Das steinerne Berlin. Geschichte der größten Mietkasernenstadt in der Welt, Kiepenhauer, Berlin 1930;

28 cf. Karl Gruber, Die Gestalt der Deutschen Stadt, Verlag Georg D.W. Callwey, München 1952; first edition Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1937;

29 cf. Walter Christaller, Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland. Eine ökonomisch-geographische Untersuchung über die Gesetzmäßigkeit der Verbreitung und Entwicklung der Siedlungen mit städtischen Funktionen, G. Fischer, Jena 1933; on Christaller's work on the planning of the new towns of the Reich in the East cf. Grundgedanken zum Siedlungs und Verwaltungsaufbau im Osten, in "Neues Bauerntum", no. 32, 1940; Kultur- und Marktbereiche der zentralen Orte im deutschen Ostraum und die Gliederung der Verwaltung, in "Raumforschung und Raumordnung" no. 4, 1940; Land und Stadt in der deutschen Volksordnung, in "Deutsche Agrarpolitik" no. 1, 1942;

30 cf. Gottfried Feder, Die neue Stadt, Julius Springer, Berlin 1939;

31 cf. ibidem, chapter entitled "Der Organismus der Stadt";

32 One of his senior assistants, Lawaczek, an engineer responsible for designing the new settlements had to escape to Sweden, whilst Feder was spared because of his personal friendship with Hitler and relegated to the Berlin Technische Hochschule after having been relieved of his ministerial post;

33 After coming to power, the revanchist and expansionist policy of the Reich needed industrial concentration and mass production. The IG Farben chemical giant employed as many as 300,000 people. This topic has been thoroughly discussed by Leon Krier in Leon Krier, Lars Olof Larsson, Albert Speer Architecture 1932-1942, Archives d'Architecture moderne, Bruxelles 1985;

34 Heirich Tessenow, Handwerk und Kleinstadt, Bruno Cassirer, Berlin l919;

35 The civil war broke out in 1917 and ended only when the German forces landed to help the nationalist forces of General Mannerheim;

36 cf. Marika Hausen, From the national to the international, in Markku Kuomen, Kimmo Friman (eds.), Saarinen in Finland, Uudeman Kirjapano, Helsinki 1986; catalogue of the exhibition organized in 1984 by the Museum of Finnish Architecture;

37 cf. Kirmo Mikkola, The roots of Saarinen's town plans, in Markku Kuomen, Kimmo Friman op. cit.

38 cf. Rory Spence, The Griffin Plan for Canberra and the Parliamentary Zone, in "Architectural Review", no. 1100, London 1988.

39 It is interesting to note that Helsinki, built anew according to 1812 Ehreström's plan after the burning in 1808, was polycentric, divided into five different districts;

40 cf. Rob Krier, Stadtraum in Theorie und Praxis, Karl Krämer, Stuttgart 1975.

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